Pages

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

The Thing about September

I love September.

It's still warm enough to spend lots of time outside, but cools off enough at night for open windows with cool breezes.

Leaves are beginning to change. Trips to the orchard to pick apples or to the farmer's market to buy them and hours spent peeling, coring, and slicing apples to transform them into applesauce become a weekly occurrence. The first big batch of chili is made and frozen in preparation for quick dinners on cool autumn nights.

With September also comes our youngest son's birthday and his annual Pirate Party, always a big hit. We gather with friends, eat good food, dig up treasure (really!), and watch our kids have piratey fun aboard our back deck pirate ship. We savor our first mulled cider of the season then, and celebrate not only a birthday, but Autumn's approach as well.

Next there's the Renaissance Faire, a family favorite. This year the kids will be dressing up - two knights, an elf mage, a queen of hearts, and a forest fairy princess. The youngest looks forward to a round of Smite the Knight, and hopefully this year she can keep a hold on herself around the King - two years ago at age three she went as a pirate and said to everyone in her path, sword at the ready, "taste my steel!"

Our weekly trips to the farm to pick up our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share continue. We watch the turkeys grow, savor the bounty the earth and the wonderful farmers provide, and stock up on the freshest of eggs, a staple in my household. The closer to the end of the season we get, the more meandering our drives home, as we all love taking in the beautiful changing leaves.

Autumn cleaning begins as well. as closets, cabinets, and bookshelves are cleaned out and organized. Cold-weather wardrobes are updated, homeschool and craft supplies reorganized and restocked.

It's back to school time here as well. There are homeschool co-op class proposals to write, lessons to plan, new approaches to learning to try. Each year looks a little different from the last. This year I yearn for a little more structure for the older learners, and for myself. I'm feeling directionless and want to work toward finding a path to go down at this time in my life.

The thing about September is that it seems for me to be the month of possibilities, of preparation, of exploration, of gearing up to slow down, of starting anew.